The picaresque life of Cagliostro the chameleon

For all its fascination for today's travellers, Palermo, Sicily, has never been one of the great cities of the world. A boy who was born in one of its back alleys, and whose childhood skills included theft, street fighting and forgery, might be expected to die in jail. And that's what happened to Giuseppe Balsamo, but not in one of Palermo's jails, and not for petty crime.

He moved on to dupe and swindle the rich and famous in Venice, Warsaw, St Petersburg and Paris. He roused Casanova to jealous rage, he infuriated Catherine of Russia, and he helped to shatter the reputation of Marie Antoinette of France. In London he faltered in his tightrope act; and in Rome, at last, he fell. But in nearly 30 years of posing and quackery, he proved that the 18th century, known as the age of reason, was as susceptible to fakes and fantasies as any other time, including our own.

Iain McCalman tells the story of the rise and fall of Balsamo, who reinvented himself first as Count Pellegrino and later as Count Cagliostro. If it suited the occasion better, he was happy to be Colonel Cagliostro.

It is a wonderful story and is briskly told, with a sharp eye for the human follies that Cagliostro exploited. McCalman is a distinguished historian, based at the Australian National University. Here, the historian is in holiday mood, evidently enjoying the experience of writing for that elusive creature, the general reader, and keeping the evidence of his considerable scholarly research well out of sight in the endnotes.

I would have liked McCalman to say more about the weightings he places on the sources of the Cagliostro story; and this could have been done without disturbing the narrative. I also wonder how McCalman himself interprets the chameleon trickster figure. Who was the man when he was at home with himself, alone? What motivates a man of many identities, or none?

In his engagingly written opening pages, McCalman visits Palermo and meditates on the origins of Cagliostro. A crumbling building in a market lane, a hole in the wall through which can be seen dimly the shell of a room, perhaps more aptly described as a cave; this is where it all began, and this is all that is left. Only a rough arch made of plywood carries the name Cagliostro. Yet for some he is a local hero, even a saint.

McCalman asks whether he was the worst scoundrel of his age or a great occult healer. He gives the authority of the last word in the book to a woman in today's Palermo who says that Cagliostro might have been a crook but that he had a great soul. This takes us back to where we started. Granted that McCalman does not have to choose, this acceptance of doubleness seems too easy.

For all that, I was beguiled by the energy and variety of the story. It is well structured in seven parts, each one showing Cagliostro in a new performance. As a self-declared initiate from the inner circles of Egyptian Freemasonry, he combined science, religion and magic. He presented himself also as a humble healer of the sick, effecting extraordinary cures, and enhancing his reputation by refusing to give his time to the rich - thereby making sure that the rich would beat on his door for admission and offer huge bribes.

Cagliostro's most famous case, that of Marie Antoinette and the diamond necklace, has been told many times, but it emerges here as racy and complex as ever. In McCalman's version there are two swindlers and two victims. The impetus came from the self-styled Countess, Jeanne de la Motte de Valois. She devised a scheme by which the arrogant Cardinal Prince de Rohan would believe that the Queen of France had fallen in love with him. Compromising letters were forged: and Rohan, bedazzled, wrote back ardently. He was then persuaded to buy on the queen's behalf a massively expensive diamond necklace, which Jeanne, the go-between, would take and sell before blackmailing the cardinal with the compromising letters. Cagliostro was arrested, but he did not share the savage punishment inflicted on Jeanne. Banished from Paris, he became known as the man who brought on the French Revolution by defaming the queen. In London and Rome, the last stages of his rogue's progress, he was treated with suspicion.

Although his final adversary was Pope Pius VI, it was Cagliostro's wife, Seraphina, who set him up. Denouncing him as a heretic, she delivered him to the Inquisition. Imprisoned for life in a remote fortress, he proved as hard to hold as Napoleon, and harder to kill than Rasputin. Last chapters of biographies often fizzle out in anticlimax. Not this one. The grisly end of the adventurer from Palermo is a page-turner, as indeed is this whole extraordinary story.

Brenda Niall is the author of The Boyds: A Family Biography, published by Miegunyah Press. Iain McCalman will be a guest at next month's Age Melbourne Writers' Festival.